William Faulkner, SANCTUARY – WordPress.com - literature save 2

she was about halfway back to the house, carrying the child in her arms, Popeye's car
passed her. She heard it coming and she got out of the road and stood there and watched
it come dropping down the hill. Temple and Popeye were in it. Popeye did not make any
sign, though Temple looked full at the woman. From beneath her hat Temple looked the
woman full in the face, without any sign of recognition whatever. The face did not turn,
the eyes did not wake; to the woman beside the road it was like a small, dead-colored
mask drawn past her on a string and then away. The car went on, lurching and jolting in
the ruts. The woman went on to the house.
The blind man was sitting on the front porch, in the sun. When she entered the
hall, she was walking fast. She was not aware of the child's thin weight. She found
Goodwin in their bedroom. He was in the act of putting on a frayed tie; looking at him,
she saw that he had just shaved.
"Yes," she said. "What is it? What is it?"
"I've got to walk up to Tull's and telephone for the sheriff," he said.
"The sheriff," she said. "Yes. All right." She came to the bed and laid the child
carefully down. "To Tull's," she said. "Yes. He's got a phone."
"You'll have to cook," Goodwin said. "There's Pap."
"You can give him some cold bread. He wont mind. There's some left in the
stove. He wont mind."
"I'll go," Goodwin said. "You stay here."
"To Tull's," she said. "All right." Tull was the man at whose house Gowan had
found a car. It was two miles away. Tull's family was at dinner. They asked her to stop. "I
just want to use the telephone," she said. The telephone was in the dining-room, where
they were eating. She called, with them sitting about the table. She didn't know the
number. "The Sheriff," she said patiently into the mouthpiece. Then she got the sheriff,
with Tull's family sitting about the table, about the Sunday dinner. "A dead man. You
pass Mr. Tull's about a mile and turn off to the right. . . . Yes, the Old Frenchman place.
Yes. This is Mrs. Goodwin talking. . . . Goodwin. Yes."
XV
Benbow reached his sister's home in the middle of the afternoon. It was four miles from
town, Jefferson. He and his sister were born in Jefferson, seven years apart, in a house
which they still owned, though his sister had wanted to sell the house when Benbow
married the divorced wife of a man named Mitchell and moved to Kinston. Benbow
would not agree to sell, though he had built a new bungalow in Kinston on borrowed
money upon which he was still paying interest.
When he arrived, there was no one about. He entered the house and he was sitting
in the dim parlor behind the closed blinds, when he heard his sister come down the stairs,
still unaware of his arrival. He made no sound. She had almost crossed the parlor door
and vanished when she paused and looked full at him, without outward surprise, with that
serene and stupid impregnability of heroic statuary; she was in white. "Oh, Horace," she
said.
He did not rise. He sat with something of the air of a guilty small boy.